As technology continues to advance and the business environments have become increasingly complex and diverse, more and more companies have relied on various customer relationship management (CRM) software and eBusiness applications to conduct and manage various aspects of their enterprise business. In general, eBusiness applications are designed to enable a company or enterprise to conduct its business over an interactive network (e.g., Internet, Intranet, Extranet, etc.) with its customers, partners, suppliers, distributors, employees, etc. eBusiness applications may include core business processes, supply chain, back-office operations, and CRM functions. CRM generally includes various aspects of interaction a company has with its customers, relating to sales and/or services. At a high level, customer relationship management is focused on understanding the customer's needs and leveraging this knowledge to increase sales and improve service. CRM application and software is generally designed to provide effective and efficient interactions between sales and service, and unify a company's activities around the customer in order to increase customer share and customer retention through customer satisfaction.
Typically, CRM implementation strategy needs to consider the following:
Knowledge Management: one of the important factors of an effective CRM implementation is the acquisition of information about a customer, its analysis, sharing and tracking. Also integral to the use of knowledge for competitive advantage is for employees to know what actions to take as a result of this knowledge.
Database Consolidation: another important aspect of an effective and efficient CRM solution is the consolidation of customer information in a single database and the re-engineering of business processes around the customer. The goal here is to have all interactions with a customer recorded in one place to drive production, marketing, sales and customer support activities.
Integration of Channels and Systems: it is very important for a CRM application/software to provide the capability to respond to customers in a consistent and high-quality manner through their channel of choice, whether that is the e-mail, the phone, web-based user interfaces, etc. This may require the seamless integration of various communication channels with the customer or enterprise database. It also may require the integration of CRM with other parts of a company's business systems and applications.
Technology and Infrastructure: to enhance customer services, a CRM application/software may include various tools to automate and streamline online customer service. For example, a self-help model typically can be implemented using a combination of tools (e.g. knowledge bases with an intuitive search capability, agent technology or automated email, etc.).
Generally, eBusiness applications are designed to allow organizations to create a single source of customer information that makes it easier to sell to, market to, and service customers across multiple channels, including the Web, call centers, field, resellers, retail, and dealer networks. Advanced eBusiness applications are typically built on a component-based architecture and are designed to be Web-based and to deliver support for various types of clients on multiple computing platforms including mobile clients, connected clients, thin clients, and handheld clients, etc.
Intense competition for customer attention, pervasive channel expansion, and the Internet explosion have spawned unprecedented levels of customer choice. With the right solution in place, each interaction presents an opportunity to better understand the unique needs of the customer or extended household. By capitalizing on customer information captured during each interaction (e.g., through a call center), organizations can suggest the best combination of products and services to meet the customer's objectives and thereby increasing the chances that the customer will remain loyal.
Traditionally, the role of the call center has been limited to handling telephone calls from customers who were reporting service outages, activating or canceling service, or inquiring about standard billing and collection issues. The metrics of success were based on efficient delivery of service and operating the customer call center as inexpensively as possible. Customer interaction was considered a “cost” of doing business.
However, as customers demand consistent service and sales support through every channel of communication, call centers are quickly evolving into complete customer contact centers. The call center's importance is rapidly escalating as it increasingly provides support for all customer interactions. Call centers now typically implement solutions providing the following capabilities:
Easy to use, unified agent desktop to allow an agent to handle multimedia interactions through a single user interface;
Consolidated view of the customer to ensure that each agent has complete knowledge of every interaction across all channels of communication including telephone, email, Web chat, Web voice, fax, and page;
Workflow automation and dynamic scripting to ensure that work is handled in the most efficient manner and that business processes and policies are always enforced;
Integrated sales, marketing, and customer service including inbound and outbound telesales, email response, and Web campaigns; and
Comprehensive Web-based architecture to allow rapid application deployment and an off-the-shelf solution to minimize the total cost of ownership.
In order to support the aforementioned capabilities, an extensive database is required to store customer related information. At times, it is critical for users of this extensive database to be able to search the database and quickly retrieve a record or piece of information. In an exemplary scenario, a manager for a computing support group receives a call from a customer trying to find out information about the customer's account and also requesting a specific marketing literature item. In this exemplary scenario, it is highly desirable to have a central facility that could quickly and efficiently peruse through the extensive database to locate the information that the customer requested.